Taste and See: Why You Can’t Know God’s Goodness Until You Experience It

“Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him.” —Psalm 34:8

There’s a kind of knowledge that can’t be communicated through words alone.

You can describe the taste of salt all day long, but if someone has never tasted it for themselves, they’ll never truly understand it. The same goes for the color red—it’s impossible to explain it to someone born blind. These realities can only be grasped through direct experience, through the senses.

That’s the genius of David’s language in Psalm 34. He doesn’t say, “Believe that the Lord is good,” or “Read about His goodness.” He says, “Taste and see.” These are sensory verbs—deeply personal, deeply experiential. He’s telling us that the goodness of God is something we must encounter, not merely observe from a distance.

In fact, David tells us exactly how we come to know God’s goodness: by taking refuge in Him. That means we actively place our trust in God. We go to Him. We lean on Him. And it’s in the act of trusting—of stepping into relationship—that we begin to experience His goodness for ourselves.

The Goodness of God Is Spiritually Discerned

But this raises a challenging question, one that atheists often ask:

“How do you know that you’re really experiencing God? How can anyone tell if something is from God?”

The answer is hard to explain—not because it’s irrational, but because it’s spiritually discerned. Scripture teaches that those who are spiritually dead are blind to the things of God. In Ephesians 2, Paul says we were once “dead in our trespasses and sins.” In 1 Corinthians 2:14, he says the natural person “does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him… and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.”

Just as a blind man cannot see light or a tasteless tongue cannot sense flavor, so too the unregenerate soul cannot perceive God’s goodness. The senses needed for that kind of knowledge are damaged by sin—not destroyed, but suppressed and twisted. Calvin called this the sensus divinitatis, an innate sense of the divine that exists in all people. But in our fallen state, that sense is dulled, even deadened. The “antenna,” so to speak, is broken.

That’s why someone can hear the Gospel a hundred times and never be moved. It’s why some people look at creation and see nothing but randomness, while others see the handiwork of God. It’s not about intelligence or education—it’s about spiritual capacity. And until that capacity is restored by God, the experience of His goodness remains hidden.

You Must Be Born Again To Experience God's Goodness

So what must happen? Jesus says it plainly: “You must be born again” (John 3:3). Regeneration isn’t just a fresh start—it’s the restoration of spiritual senses. It’s the moment when the blind begin to see and the tasteless tongue comes alive. It’s when you finally taste the goodness you’ve heard others describe but never understood.

Only then can you really know that God is good—not just as an idea, but as a reality. Only then can you truly say with David: “Taste and see that the LORD is good.”